


Rounds

by bmouse



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Pre-Blue Lily Lily Blue, hints of Noah/everyone but that's just me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-19
Updated: 2015-08-19
Packaged: 2018-04-15 13:05:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4607847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bmouse/pseuds/bmouse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What does Noah do most nights anyway? Well, he has a bit of a schedule. Five places. Four, and one more.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rounds

It's nice, most of his rounds involve people now. Ronan, Gansey, Adam, the forest, the other place. It's nice how that’s still small enough that he can count them on one hand.

Five things, he learned that early on, that's about as many things as he can think about at once and not have things get… thin. Fuzzy. Five things. Four, and one more. Luckily that's how many friends he has: four (and one more). 

The sun has set. Somehow he always knows when it's night. Sometimes he doesn't know what year it is but he always knows when it's night. That’s fine. Nighttime means doing the rounds.

 

ONE. 

 

Ronan's already asleep tonight. That's rare, that usually takes coaxing. He doesn’t mind though. It used to be that he could only stay and keep Ronan company at night if Ronan was drinking. He knew he looked too different at night. Before they had re-buried him it had been so much harder to pretend to be alive when he was up close with someone. Now everyone knew what to expect; everything was nicer, easier.

Now he and Ronan could hang out all night whenever he wanted. Ronan knew that he was down to listen to any kind of music, to help with any kind of stunt, to receive any number of secrets into his willing ear. 

Now he can see Ronan curled like a long black comma on the bed, his head facing the wrong direction. As he comes closer Chainsaw looks at him and shifts back and forth on her perch but she's sleepy too, and he's glad. She might even fall asleep before he leaves instead of watching him the whole time. Prolonged exposure has made things peaceful between them.

Animals usually don’t like him. They knew what him taking away their warmth meant, in a way that people didn’t. Sometimes, before now, years before now when he only had 2 rounds, he could stalk a single stray cat up and down the streets of Henrietta for hours just to sneak a brush of his hand along its back. He was always so happy when he managed it but the cats flinched or hissed or huddled in on themselves and so with extreme effort he made himself stop. 

Now he doesn’t touch Ronan but leans over him. Studies his breathing. Is it the right kind of breathing for sleep? Seems like it. That’s one of those things he can’t remember anymore. Ronan’s face is peaceful at least, and it stays that way for a while. He stays too, watching until Chainsaw’s eyes close and the moonlight from the window makes a slightly different angle across the floor.

Before he leaves he pulls the cover up over Ronan’s shoulders and off his bony, lighter-shaded feet. Ronan likes to have his feet a little cold when he’s sleeping. He’s never told anyone that, but Noah knows.

 

TWO.

 

Gansey’s glasses are slipping off the edge of his nose. He’s so tired that he just blinks muzzily when Noah appears in front of him and pushes them back up with a helpful finger.

“Um… evening?” Gansey says.

“It’s 1. _Not_ in the evening.”

This isn’t even the sad part. The sad part is that at 1am Gansey’s in a polo shirt and chinos. He’s still wearing his wristwatch, which is like the WASP version of still having your suit on hours after you come home from work. Obviously while Noah was _out_ he got so caught up with the daisy chain of books that are now scattered in mini-forts around his outstretched legs that he didn’t even put on sweatpants. 

Gansey owns sweatpants, in theory. At least he must have had some for the rowing team. But what he actually ends up with whenever he manages to remember that comfortable pants exist are honest to god egyptian cotton pajama sleep pants. Worse, they’re the bottoms from a _matched set_ , the top of which has a legit breast pocket and an embroidered ‘RCG’ monogram on the collar. At least they’d shown a little decency and left out the ‘III’.

Noah wants to flap his hands at him sometimes. Like ‘Yes I know, you have an old soul but _dude. Duuuude._ You don’t have to dress like it.’ Though part of that’s totally him projecting. Being stuck in the same outfit for years gives him the acute urge to dress up his friends; something that only Blue is up for with any satisfying regularity. 

Well Ronan’s asleep, which is a state that should be preserved so it’s gonna be Noah’s turn to deal with this. 

“Ok, up we go.” 

“..sorry.”

Tonight Noah’s solid enough to nudge Gansey over to his mattress with strategic presses of hands/cold spots under his arms and a very light push to the back. He’s solid enough to work the microwave and get a cup of warmed milk from their disaster of a kitchen to the top of the antique steamer trunk that Gansey’s been using as a nightstand. Gansey drinks it, but in rationed little sips, not guzzling it down like a normal guy. 

Gansey’s a rare thing. He’s bad at being a person in a completely different way than Noah was bad at being a person. Noah watches him fall back onto the rumpled comforter, watches his eyes focus and unfocus on the dozens of glow-in-the-dark stars that Blue had bought for them at the dollar store and that Noah helped her install inhumanly high on the ceiling. Gansey’s lips are silently mouthing out the constellations.

His body relaxes, settling down. Noah lets himself settle down beside him. “Perseus is over there.” he says into his ear.

Gansey nods faintly in satisfaction and closes his eyes.

 

THREE.

 

Adam is third in the rotation because it usually takes Noah a little while to get to his place. Ronan may have helped him get over his hang-up with churches, but coming here after-hours he still can’t help feeling like he’s breaking into some ‘Living and Faithful Only’ zone. And even though he ought to know better he’s always paranoid that one of the particularly devout staff will be able to see him. That could get awkward.

But tonight he has a great idea. He doesn’t have to go _inside_ the building at all, not in the normal sense. The drain that goes along the side of the parish has those old-school attachments that make a perfect ladder. He knows this. He used to do stuff like this. His shoes remember digging into chain-link fences, his knees (the memory of his knees?) remember how far they have to bend to land on the other side. It’s easy to follow the drain up.

Once he’s up on the roof it’s a little tricky to stand. He _can_ stand on things, as long as they’re solid. This includes some truly improbable shit like weathervanes and TV antennas. He had good balance at one point, but balancing gets a lot harder when sometimes you can’t tell where you end and the air begins. 

At least the view is fantastic. He loses a little time looking at it and by the time he’s traced out the edge of every slow-moving night cloud he gets used to the air currents and stops wobbling on his perch like a wind sock. Just in time; the little yellow square of a window above opens and Adam sticks his head out.

For a moment they just look at each other.

“Are you allright, Noah?”

“...yeah.”

“Why are you outside my window?”

“Rounds. Nuns freak me out. Your hallway’s boring to look at.” 

“Is the roof any better?”

“Tonight it is.” 

There’s a big moon out. Noah’s still not quite over the way moonlight goes _through_ his hands if he holds them up; it’s like the light catches _in_ him sometimes. That’s one of the good things. Being dead sucks overall, but there’s a few good things.

Anyway, he must look pretty cool just then, all dressed up in borrowed light. Pity Adam doesn’t seem to notice. Hmm... wait, no. He’s noticed. He’s just trying not to stare or be weird about it. Adam’s a stand up guy like that.

If he could really _feel_ it he’s sure the thought would make him warmer. 

“Well OK.” Adam says after a beat “Come in, if you feel like it.”

A little while later Adam doesn’t seem surprised to see him abruptly inside the apartment. He just looks up from where he’s studying, cross-legged on his $3 rug, textbooks spread over his mattress. He looks a little lit-up himself, the light from the overhead light bulb catches in his hair. 

Noah waves absently, and wafts over until he’s more or less over Adam’s bare-by-necessity mattress. A textbook tries to press insistently _through_ his thigh before giving up and shifting to make room. ‘Three guys’ beds in one night,’ he thinks and snorts silently into his own cupped hands.

"Still trying to catch Ronan huh?" he asks.

Adam nods absently. 

Adam does Math, History, English and Latin in that order as long as Noah's known him and he’s on Latin already. It must be late. 

The supplementary Latin workbook’s full of famous speeches by the more obscure philosophers. Quotes you can’t Google as easily. Though whoever put it together completely fucked up the kerning: the letters are in a pretentious old-timey font but they’re smashing into each other, like a dyslexic’s nightmare. It's easier to understand if someone reads it out loud...

He stops because Adam is staring at him 

"What?" 

"Your pronunciation pretty good." 

"Hey it's dead language, right?" Noah snickers. It even sounds right this time. Sometimes when he laughs he knows it’s faded, barely moving the air around. Adam laughs too, that surprised laugh. He lets Noah read a couple more until his voice starts sounding like it’s coming from far away, crackling like radio static. 

Outside a car pulls into the church parking lot. A car door opens, closes. A latch creaks. Semi-ordinary night sounds.

Adam’s head snaps up. The little room is filled with the sound of rustling leaves, rushing water. He can almost see the vines creeping ominously across the floor, thorns ready. 

“It’s not him.” Noah whispers.

“Adam, it’s not him. If it were, I’d tell you.”

 

FOUR.

 

The old church is new, for him anyway. It's on the line but not quite Cabeswater. Cabeswater’s edges creep up against the ruined border wall like waves on a lakeshore. He thought he’d gone all over town in these past seven years. He spent months at a time letting himself be be ferried around - half there half not-there - through the surrounding forests by currents of leyline energy but he can’t remember coming here. Not that his memory’s 100% these days.

Now it’s the easiest thing in the world to suddenly _be_ here, standing over the mound of dirt that that doesn’t look fresh anymore now that it’s getting colonized by grass. Though he can still see a couple of the flowers Blue took from the wreath on his official, emptied grave.

He should move on but it's kind of compulsive, like tripple-tapping your wallet and your car keys before you leave the house. He remembers he’d done that, the last time. Not that it helped. It doesn’t take long, he can _feel_ them there, so he sits on the lichen-eaten stone bench and counts them out. Yep, there they are - all 206 bones. Though he did break his right ulna in middle school after a kickflip went to shit. Is that enough to make it 207? Probably not, it healed clean, there’s barely a bump.

He stands up and with a little push jumps from the bench to the next gravestone over. It's a real obstacle course - most people buried here couldn’t afford the big thick gravestones and half of them are tilted at crazy angles. The big question is; can he beat his high score? The previous record for Grave Jumper(which, if he imagines it as one of those old arcade cabinets, the HI SCORE slots would just be a whole screen of ‘CZERNY’, ‘CZERNY’, ‘CZERNY’, with a stray ‘LYNCH’ somewhere around the bottom) is 27 jumps, with no repeats until he slips and lands on the grass or fades out enough that he can’t touch things. Tonight he gets close but doesn't quite break it.

For a little while he just kind of leaves himself where he’d slipped and fallen off the last headstone in the chain. The grass intermeshes with his fingers in a way that would make one of those nice artsy Polaroids. It's quiet.

Of course the last place his _leftovers_ were was quiet too but this one is cleaner somehow. It doesn't have any bad memories attached. There’s more... dignity here. Other people's remains were also brought here deliberately, probably not in the trunk of an orange Camaro but also by people who gave a shit. It’s overgrown but everything is still really green. People had actually planted flowers around some of the older graves instead of just leaving them to die in plastic vases.

Time is a little more variable here than most other places. He could stay longer. Stay, let himself drift off, ‘wake up’ re-assembled somehow in his bedroom in Monmouth, but it’s time to go to the last place.

 

(and one more)

 

The police have mostly stripped the apartment. The books and clothes are in an evidence locker at the station at the edge of town. The Lean Cuisine and the cheap beer have long been taken out of the fridge. The shelves look especially sad and shabby without anything on them.

At least the couch is still there. 

Downstairs the landlord is puttering around in his unit. He’s had a hard time sleeping lately and the upstairs apartment features prominently in his skittering thoughts. Mostly he’s thinking what a pain in the ass it’s going to be to rent the place out again after all the hoopla in the newspapers. 

He’s also thinking of giving the couch and the shelves to a younger sister, weighing the odds of her losing her shit if she found out that he’d re-gifted her family something that belonged to a murder suspect. To a murderer. But the couch is a genuine leather Chesterfield. No one from the previous owner’s family will show up to take it. Noah’s pretty sure practicality will win out in the end. 

It’s not the greatest feeling sometimes, touching things, especially things he’d touched before he was the way he is now. But the idea that it’ll be elsewhere soon makes him feel super-fond of the couch, even more than he was before, and so he carefully moves himself over to it and carefully stretches out. The leather barely creaks.

He wonders what would happen, right now, with the landlord downstairs, if he lifted the couch and dropped it a couple of times. He could rip up the police tape, knock something over or drag something, the way he used to mess with the books on nights when Barry was too drunk to notice.

What would happen if he scratched ‘DON’T TAKE IT AWAY’ or something equally freaky into the wallpaper and in the morning someone found it? Would the landlord just give up? Could the couch stay here indefinitely? 

He inhales. Under his cheek the cushion still smells like Barry’s hair stuff. He’d fall asleep there half the time anyway.

In a way, it’s an appealing thought. Frost blooms on the brass rivet nearest to his cheek. He watches it creep upward, until all the rivets are faintly white, until all the air inside the apartment is crisp and deep and cold as snowmelt… Then he sighs and makes himself stop.

No, not that way. It’s not like he doesn’t use it, sometimes. Especially lately. But he’s always suspected that Real Ghost Shit was a slippery slope and if he didn’t reign it in he could tumble into a darkness that was beyond where he’s been before. Something even further down than watching your own ribcage come up through the soggy autumn leaves and crying in frustration as spring birds took flaking, brittle clumps of your hair for their nests. 

Still, if he can’t stop the apartment changing and the walls being painted over and someone living here who never knew him and didn’t remember him, and didn’t think/speak his name to themselves several times a day, then he’s going to lose one of his rounds. Down to four. 

Let’s not get things wrong, he loves the number four. Being one of four is what’s kept him going. But pentagrams are a more stable shape than squares. And if he’s going to do more than watch and warn people he’s going to need all the stability he can get.

Next time he’s around Blue he’s going to ask her if he can stop by 300 Fox Way some nights. Not like, _in her room_ or anything (well, unless she invited him in) but just to hang around a little while. Check up on things. He folds down a finger on his left hand to help him remember and with the barely audible sound of the leather springing back into shape the apartment is empty again. 

 

~

**Author's Note:**

> I really love the Raven Cycle, the books are fantastic and the plotting is really well done; the clues, the callbacks, the ships, everything. Noah is the character I really got stuck on though. I have a major love for literally anything to do with him (graphics/headcanons/fic whatever) and inevitably I ended up writing something. If you want to flail about the fluffy dead boy I'm also on tumblr.


End file.
